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Glossary Term – Event

During the Little Ice Age (ca. 1400–1850), dramatic global climate change occurred, with temperatures declining precipitously. The date for the onset of this shift was once thought to be 1550, but new evidence shows that it had already begun as early as 1150 and became severe enough in northern latitudes to cause significant population shifts as early as the mid-fourteenth century. At its height, growing seasons in the northern regions of North America and Europe were shortened by as much as 20 percent, leading to frequent crop failures and...

Glossary Term – Organization

Like the Iroquois League, this confederation of Algonquian-speaking peoples in what is now Virginia seems to have formed in response to the effects of the Little Ice Age. Oral testimony suggests that it began forming around 1550—the time that the climate reached its severest stage. Consisting initially of six villages in the area that is now Richmond, it expanded significantly toward the end of the sixteenth century under the influence of the dynamic leader Wahunsunacock, called the Powhatan. Over a twenty-year period, Powhatan drew in...